Well, I Guess Obama Hasn’t Healed the Planet

When Barack Obama won his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, he proclaimed that “generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that… this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Six years later, the president is threatening to go around Congress and upend the American economy in a misguided attempt to secure his legacy on climate change.

President Obama wants to use the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The two main problems with this: It would devastate the economy and it would NOT heal the planet, so to speak.

“Even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gas emissions entirely, we would not moderate the Earth’s temperature more than a few tenths of a degree Celsius by the end of the century,” said Heritage’s Nicolas Loris, the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow.

Read that again: A few tenths of a degree—from taking extreme measures.

And how well do these dire climate projections do in reality? In fact, the climate models the administration relied on for its proposals projected the earth would warm 0.3 degree Celsius over the past 17 years—which did not happen, Loris reports. During that time, carbon dioxide emissions did increase—yet the projected warming did not happen.

That doesn’t bother the White House, which continues hyping the latest climate report with “with bogus claims of past, current and predicted climate impacts,” says David Kreutzer, Heritage’s research fellow in energy economics and climate change.

You may not be able to count on the White House’s climate projections, but there are several things you can count on from Obama’s action plan:

higher energy prices

lower incomes for Americans

slower economic growth

White House adviser John Podesta said this week that congressional attempts to block the administration have “zero percent chance” of working. Will members of Congress take that as a challenge and step up to protect Americans from this wrongheaded plan that would bring only economic harm for no environmental benefit?

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